HP proposes dung as fuel source for data centers

Giving new meaning to the term “server farm,” a team of Hewlett-Packard researchers has come up with an idea for an environmentally friendly data center – powered by manure. Siliconvalley.com reports that HP scientists have proposed using a “biogas” recovery system to turn livestock waste into methane to generate electricity for data centers. The system would also use the heat from the computers in the data centers to convert the animal waste into fuel. HP says it has no immediate plans to do this, but acknowledges that, as things stand, data centers are huge electricity suckers.